Hardware & Technical 8Gb vs 16Gb debate...

How much memory

  • Ive got 8Gb or less and thats what im sticking too

    Votes: 39 27.7%

  • I've got 8Gb and am looking to increase it

    Votes: 31 22.0%

  • I've got 16Gb and its fine

    Votes: 53 37.6%

  • I've got 16Gb and want more!!!

    Votes: 18 12.8%
  • Total voters
    141

Rog

Rog
8GB here, regularly use up to 50% of that without trying very hard at all. Any extra isn't wasted though: Windows uses it for caching as far as I can remember.

That said, my new machine might get 16GB for a bit of future proofing. Would love to know where all this cheap RAM is though! :D

Wouldn't a 64-bit E: D make more efficient use of the memory bandwith and CPU capabilities?
 

Cody

Cody
Rog said:
Would love to know where all this cheap RAM is though!
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<grins> Yeah, I keep seeing 'RAM is cheap' - not nearly as cheap as it was a year or so ago.
I have 8GB, which should be plenty (I do have two spare slots if RAM does drop in price though).
 

cadmonkey33

cadmonkey33
DDR3 is less than half the price of DDR2, or at least it was a couple of months ago. ~£70 for 8gb. Part of the reason I decided to build a new PC rather than just upgrade my RAM, even though I was still fairly happy with my Q6600 CPU.
 

Dr Wookie

Dr Wookie
I bought my new PC for ED, hooked up to my home theatre. I also play other games and watch netflix and YouTube on my tv.

I have 8 gb, and that is plenty, even though my graphics card borrows 2 GB of ram.

I've seen alpha 2 use all 8 threads of my quad core CPU, so CPU or GPU are probably more important than ram.
 

FS3DPete

F
I find the 4gb 32-bit limitation to be really difficult to deal with for apps if the system itself only had 4gb RAM on board. A 64-bit OS and 8GB RAM gives a lot more breathing room and requires less paging out, so if you were only playing games, capturing to video stream, and running a FRAPS counter, 8gb is currently sufficient (barring a new OS that has more bloat).

I have 16GB installed, and could go to 32GB (if I wanted to replace all the sticks, which I may do in order to get faster RAM sticks anyway), but I currently don't need it (the only software I use that comes close to maxing out its use is my 3D software, and only when doing high complexity scenes with eight digit point and polygon counts without instances).
 

Rog

Rog
Dr Wookie said:
I bought my new PC for ED, hooked up to my home theatre. I also play other games and watch netflix and YouTube on my tv.

I have 8 gb, and that is plenty, even though my graphics card borrows 2 GB of ram.

I've seen alpha 2 use all 8 threads of my quad core CPU, so CPU or GPU are probably more important than ram.
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Interesting that E: D uses all 8 cores if available. I guess it's worth the extra for an i7 rather than an i5 then.

Bah! More cash...
 

[VR] Mad Mike

[VR] Mad Mike
Personally I would be amazed if an i5 will be even close to a limitation for ED. I am not convinced hyper threading offers much to gaming tbh....... esp for the price differential. The money saved would make for a v nice GPU upgrade...
 

Riandor

Riandor
I have 32Gb, purely because i struck whilst it was almost dirt cheap back end of 2012.
I tend to do music recording and the software is quite RAM intensive, but still, 32gb is overload.
 

Cosmos

C
I think the problem is that developers are still catering to machines that are past their best before date. I can't particularly fault them for it but when it comes to games there is no doubt a discussion about making products accessible to as many people as possible.

At the moment 8GB is perfectly sufficient for games with a fair bit to spare but we could be getting much more from the present hardware.. especially better looking and more detailed textures.

There are also nifty bits of software out there that allow us to allocate an area of RAM as a drive and that can be rather useful. I find myself having a RAM disk like back in the Amiga days.
 

Kerrash

Kerrash
8-12GB is likely to become the sweet spot over the next few years given the release of the new consoles.

I will be upgrading soon...
 

GuruNot

GuruNot
Got 16GB in mine and likely to eventually go up to 32GB on next build. That is unless it is DDR4 , which is likely to be ludicrously expensive initially, in which case I will stay at 16GB.

I Run a number of Virtual Machines for lab testing and do some video and photo editing. Those tasks use more RAM than any of the games I play.

I have also just started playing around with RAM Disks again, to see if they offer any dramatic performance improvements.
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
X2Eliah said:
True, but so far we only have tiny instances with less than 20 active ships, no background tasks and no universe to speak of; the final game with all systems and stuff working might very well have a much larger memory footprint than currently.
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True, though don't forget just how large even 1Mb is - the only things that really take more than that are graphics textures and audio (and audio files can be big but are used slowly enough that they can be streamed off disk a few Mb at a time). Graphics textures can be tens or hundreds of Mb each, and need to be in fast memory, but the ships are very low-polygon compared with how something more organic would need to be modelled, and mostly seen at a fairly large distance where you can't make out much detail at all: you're not going to have many ships even in a really busy system simultaneously so close that you need the full-size textures of all of them to avoid blurring, so there's lots of room for optimisation there. I expect the memory usage will go up, but perhaps not by as much as you might expect.

(Now, once planetary landings and walking about expansions are in, and there are a lot of close-up organic objects on the screen, then I'd expect higher memory usage)

cadmonkey33 said:
You actually lose performance in a 64bit app.
However, it's a bit much to expect large games to use <2gb these days.
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But then, this is Elite IV - the original fitted 2000+ systems into 32 kilobytes (a significant proportion of which was needed by the graphics memory); the sequel put an entire galaxy on a 1 megabyte floppy disk. If anyone can make a game which has an implausibly low memory footprint for what it does, it's Frontier.
 
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